Terran Williams > Quotes

“God could have created the two sexes simultaneously, but he did not. Why? One answer leads: Adam is formed first and then Eve, because God wants to demonstrate to Adam (and his sons) how desperately alone, incomplete and inadequate he is without Eve (and her daughters)—God’s final creation.”
― Terran Williams, How God Sees Women: The End of Patriarchy

“book as large and complex as the Bible can, roughly speaking, be made to support any foregone conclusions one makes about reality. As a white South African Christian, I should know. In my country, just a few decades ago, some of our most learned “biblical” theologians read their racism into the Bible, instead of letting the Bible call out their racism.”
― Terran Williams, How God Sees Women: The End of Patriarchy

“Until the 1960s, says complementarian scholar Daniel Doriani, theologians assumed female “ontological inferiority.”[44] Theologians, clergy and everyone else until this time, generally saw women as “inferior” and men as “superior.” They argued that the Bible said as much.”
― Terran Williams, How God Sees Women: The End of Patriarchy

“The gift of the Spirit is given not only as an aspect of one’s full salvation and inclusion in God’s people, but also on behalf of one’s full participation in the mission of God.”
― Terran Williams, How God Sees Women: The End of Patriarchy

“Lost in the desert wilderness, with a broken heart, a hopeless spirit and a violated body, God sees Hagar and calls out a future greatness through her that prevailing social conditions should have made near impossible. She responds to God’s affirmation by being the only person in all of Scripture to name her Maker as, “The God who sees me.”
― Terran Williams, How God Sees Women: The End of Patriarchy

“John Goldingay warns against treating the Bible as a defence-document to undergird our existing beliefs: “A test whether this is so is to ask when was the last time one changed one’s mind (or better, one’s behaviour) because of something one read in Scripture. In general, we all use Scripture to confirm rather than to confront [our beliefs], merely to ‘replicate ourselves.”
― Terran Williams, How God Sees Women: The End of Patriarchy

“in Genesis 2, in which the foremost meaning is given: “It is not good for man to be alone, I will make a suitable helper for him.” She helps him by rescuing him from his aloneness. She is his companion.”
― Terran Williams, How God Sees Women: The End of Patriarchy

“That’s why, to understand God’s word, we need to put aside the sensibilities and assumptions of our culture, and do our best to enter into the framework of theirs.”
― Terran Williams, How God Sees Women: The End of Patriarchy

“The reason I must labour this point is to highlight that complementarianism, with its teaching of “equal but different roles” is every bit as much a departure from the historical position of the church as male–female mutualism is.[12] Both positions did not exist just 60 years ago! They are mere infants in the history of biblical interpretation, and thus, complementarianism has no more claim to pre-existence than male–female mutualism.”
― Terran Williams, How God Sees Women: The End of Patriarchy

“In 18 of the 19 instances, the one being helped is not the leader of the helper.[112] Eight of these uses the “helper” is a “saviour,” “protector,” or “rescuer.” In the remaining occurrences, the nature of the help is an offering of strength, often of a military nature.”
― Terran Williams, How God Sees Women: The End of Patriarchy

“Yet in Paul’s mind, our status before God will shape our concrete relationships and the form the church takes. The gospel of Christ opens up not only a new way of relating to God but also to one another.”
― Terran Williams, How God Sees Women: The End of Patriarchy

“Holding Galatians and Philemon side by side, we notice that Paul deals with Jew–Gentile and free–slave tensions in the same way: without denying the social differences, he seeks to dissolve the hierarchy as far as possible, by applying the uniting and equalising power of the gospel.”
― Terran Williams, How God Sees Women: The End of Patriarchy

“Here’s the key point: both views were brand new in the history of the church. Patriarchalists swapped out the previous doctrine that “women are inferior and thus subordinate to men” with “women are equal yet nonetheless subordinate to men,” while mutualists opted instead for “women are equal and thus not subordinate to men.”
― Terran Williams, How God Sees Women: The End of Patriarchy

“In contrast with the rabbis, who avoided even mentioning women, Jesus populates his sermons with female characters. Scandalously, he likens God’s joy at our salvation to that of a widow who finds her lost coin.”
― Terran Williams, How God Sees Women: The End of Patriarchy

“Missiologist, Alan Hirsch, explains this well: An increasing sense of anomaly develops from within the paradigm, a feeling that something is wrong. Or, at least, the prevailing mode of thought cannot resolve all the problems the paradigm itself faces. Paradoxically, it is those who have mastered the prevailing paradigm who are most often the first ones to break from the consensus—for example, Einstein and Heisenberg in science, or Calvin and Barth in theology. The real experts are the ones most able and likely to perceive when things are wrong! Thus begins what Kuhn calls “a roaming of the mind,” a new sense of freedom to engage anomalies without recourse to the preconceived assumptions and set of solutions.”
― Terran Williams, How God Sees Women: The End of Patriarchy

“To ezer someone, then, is to make up what is lacking in them by offering one’s strength or intervention.”
― Terran Williams, How God Sees Women: The End of Patriarchy

“says Galef, whereas, Scouts are curious. They’re more likely to say they feel pleasure when they learn new information or feel an itch to solve a puzzle. They’re more likely to feel intrigued when they encounter something that contradicts their expectations, [and] more likely to say they think it’s virtuous to test your own beliefs, and they’re less likely to say that someone who changes his mind seems weak.”
― Terran Williams, How God Sees Women: The End of Patriarchy

“To credit the man as her authority because she was made from some of his body would mean that Adam would need to call the soil his master, for he was made of dust.”
― Terran Williams, How God Sees Women: The End of Patriarchy

“The thought that I was happy with our theology for so long because it benefited me while bruising so many others, grieves me now.”
― Terran Williams, How God Sees Women: The End of Patriarchy

“This is why Paul writes, “When I became a man, I put away childish things,” and not, “I put away feminine things.” Instead of contrasting womanhood with, as we often do, manhood, perhaps we’re meant to contrast both with childhood. Children tend to await instruction, to be self-centered, fearful and extremely dependent on others. In contrast, we know we have matured in womanhood and manhood when we have learnt to serve others, be interdependent, and take more initiative and responsibility.”
― Terran Williams, How God Sees Women: The End of Patriarchy

“What is particularly fascinating, however, is that the word never denotes subordination in the Old Testament. In fact, the word translated “helper” (Hebrew: ezer) is used predominantly in the Bible for God helping his people.”
― Terran Williams, How God Sees Women: The End of Patriarchy

“he tells him to now lay down his life for his wife, to not exasperate his children, and to not threaten his slaves. This would have been an absolutely groundbreaking challenge in its day. In a culture that gave husbands the power of life and death over their wives, Paul tells husbands to lay down their power, even to die if need be, so their wives can flourish.”
― Terran Williams, How God Sees Women: The End of Patriarchy

“Here’s a woman who, for close on two decades, has attended this faith community, disfigured and buckled over in pain. The spiritual leader, whose job is to see people in their community as God sees them, does not seem bothered by her dismal condition. It’s only when she stands upright that he takes offence. Jesus then sends further shockwaves through the gathering as he bestows on this woman a title that has never been given before: “[T]his woman [is] a daughter of Abraham.” Sarah Bessey comments on this moment: “People had only ever heard of ‘sons of Abraham’—never daughters. But at the sound of Jesus’ words ‘daughter of Abraham,’ he gave her a place to stand alongside the sons, especially the ones snarling with their sense of ownership and exclusivity over it all.”
― Terran Williams, How God Sees Women: The End of Patriarchy

“One of the most common errors the church continues to make is to read Scripture through the lens of culture rather than to read culture through the lens of Scripture.”
― Terran Williams, How God Sees Women: The End of Patriarchy

“We imagine that the married couples present in the Ephesian church were more or less like modern ones. We imagine that Paul “sees” us, our contemporary marriages, and therefore writes this letter to us. But no, the marriages he addresses are those in the first century Greco-Roman world, so different from our own.”
― Terran Williams, How God Sees Women: The End of Patriarchy

“The Christian today is separated from the biblical audience by a “river” of differences (e.g., language, culture, circumstances). This river hinders us from moving straight from meaning in their context to meaning in ours. We are certainly part of the same great story, but our place in the story is often different from that of our spiritual ancestors. Sometimes the river is wide, requiring a long bridge for crossing. At other times, it is a narrow creek, which we can cross easily. We need to know just how wide the river is before we start trying to construct a principalising bridge across it.[367]”
― Terran Williams, How God Sees Women: The End of Patriarchy

“In all Paul’s letters he is especially concerned with the difference the gospel actually makes to the practical life of the community. The church is not meant to merely believe the gospel. The church exists to work out in and through its community, the best way for people to relate to and function alongside each other. It is the one place in the world where all are meant to participate on an equal footing.”
― Terran Williams, How God Sees Women: The End of Patriarchy

“That Jesus later rubs their noses in their failure to listen to their sisters,[494] makes undoubtable the lesson he is trying to teach us men, right at the launch of the church in the world: learn to accept God’s word in the mouths of your sisters. That Jesus stitches this crucial insight into history’s most important day, and that the writers of the Gospels record it, means that it is a priority lesson we subsequent communities of Christ-followers must never forget.”
― Terran Williams, How God Sees Women: The End of Patriarchy

“Julia Galef, in a Ted Talk, argues that we should also learn to live and think in scout mode: “The scout’s job is not to attack or defend. The scout’s job is to understand. The scout wants to know what's really there, as accurately as possible. And in a real, actual army, both the soldier and the scout are essential.”
― Terran Williams, How God Sees Women: The End of Patriarchy

“The real sign of God’s work in both men and women is that they both pursue Christlikeness. It’s no secret what Jesus is like. Perhaps Revelation 5 best sums up the stereotype-defying nature of Jesus. In it, John is told to look at “the Lion of Judah” who has triumphed, but when he lifts his head to see him, he is surprised to see “a Lamb, looking as if it had been slain.” Jesus is both the undaunted lion, and the slain lamb. He carries a scepter of authority, but he also carries the scars from being nailed to a cross. He is both majestic and meek. He is both king and servant. He stands tall, exalted to the heavens, but also kneels down to scoop us to his chest. He is powerful, yet vulnerable; authoritative, yet approachable; assertive, yet acquiescent; roaring, yet weeping; unbreakable, yet broken.”
― Terran Williams, How God Sees Women: The End of Patriarchy